American poverty: Hillary Clinton would have done nothing for these people. But will Donald Trump be any better for them?

The claim that there is no left/right divide in politics anymore, and it has been replaced by neoliberalism and neoconservatism is the sort of thing that many might dismiss as conspiracy theory nonsense.

But it is close enough to accurate in the USA, where they have only ever really had a right/right divide in any case, and was accurate in the UK when the Labour Party was run by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. Why else would Margaret Thatcher have said her greatest achievement was New Labour?

Jeremy Corbyn has drawn a line under that and is pushing back towards “traditional” Labour Party values – and the mass media reaction in the UK tends to confirm the claims in this article, that they will support gross lies in order to maintain a status quo that lowers living standards for the poor domestically and starts wars abroad.

From the evidence, Donald Trump is a raging racist, sexist, xenophobe, liar, cheat, and narcissist – but I also agree that most of his supporters want “real social justice” as defined here, although they’ll be out of luck when it comes to healthcare.

I also agree that “any woman [or indeed anyone] who finds herself having to work three jobs and [is] still unable to adequately feed her children or to have enough ‘disposable income’ to feel she has a decent standard of living, will have little problem overlooking sexist remarks or racist hyperbole by a potential president if he promises to address the serious issues that concern her and do away with the kleptocratic policies pursued by Obama (and by Clinton, and by the Bush administration).”

The article goes on to say, “most of this underclass in the US are unlikely to be savvy political analysts with a deep understanding of the nature of the rapacious neoliberal/neoconservative agenda. But what they do understand is that if their living standards have continued to fall under one government, then that government is responsible, and a change is in order.”

That is something we are told the electorate here in the UK has yet to grasp.

But we are told it via opinion polls that do not reflect what is actually happening at polling stations, where Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour has been making very strong headway with double-figure increases in the percentage of people voting for the party. Here’s a typical example:

The conclusion – that fascism isn’t on the American agenda because of Trump but “has been your bread-and-butter for decades” – is eerily similar to my own, in an article late yesterday.

The difference is that, while Jeremy Corbyn has a proven Parliamentary record against which we can judge his choices, Mr Trump does not. I think this is why we have seen some abominable behaviour in the United States since his victory.

We will know him by his actions. He has a lot to disprove.

The fact that Donald Trump was elected President of the USA is largely irrelevant. What is relevant is the conditions that allowed for him to be elected President of the USA.

So what drove Americans to vote for either Trump or Hillary in this week’s US presidential election? Ask the mainstream media, or any Hillary supporter, and they’ll probably tell you it was issues like liberal values and social justice. They’ll also tell you that Trump supporters were motivated primarily by racism, sexism, and hatred. In reality, Trump voters were just as concerned about social injustice. In fact, this is the issue behind most popular votes around the world these days. And ironically, Trump voters were arguably more concerned about social justice than the liberals who voted Hillary because the social justice that drove millions to vote for Trump is very different to the ‘social justice’ that concerned Hillary supporters.

Here we need to note the clear distinction between the working-class ‘rednecks’ in the USA, and some of those in a more upwardly mobile financial position. Most people who voted for Trump were the ‘rednecks’ and they did so because they are feeling the negative effects of 8 years of the Obama government’s ‘liberal’ economic and foreign policies that have continued unchanged since the ‘conservative’ Bush years (you might wonder why that is and how it works – hint: the president isn’t the ‘decider’, by a long shot). Those policies coincided with the 2008 ‘crash’ and the bank ‘bailouts’ that saw millions of American homes repossessed and many traditional manufacturing job losses, both of which disproportionately affected the poor.

It was precisely this marginalization of the most vulnerable in society that was behind the Brexit vote in the UK earlier this year. Both the British people’s vote to leave the EU and American people’s vote for Trump were not primarily votes for racism or xenophobia but votes against the neoliberal status quo under which the poor saw their living standards drop further and everyone saw war and death abroad increase.

To underline the bipartisan nature of these protest votes; in the US it was the nominally ‘left’ government candidate that was rejected while in the UK the protest vote occurred under the nominally ‘right’ Conservative government. The point being; the supposed ‘left’/’right’ political paradigm in Western democracies no longer exists. It has been replaced by a combination of neoliberalism and neoconservatism, two fancy words that describe ideologies that together form the ‘elite’ project for transnational globalization and domination of the world’s resources by corporations and their political friends through the ‘projection’ of US military power around the world.

So while the mainstream media, largely supportive of Hillary as the establishment candidate, spent the last 12 months spreading the line that Trump supporters are ‘deplorables’ and that Trump himself is a raging racist, sexist, xenophobe, liar, cheat, and narcissist, this was a gross lie that hid the truth that most Trump supporters were motivated by a desperate desire for better jobs, better wages, better health care (or any health care), etc. In other words, real social justice.

Sorry to bombard you , but I thought this was also worth sharing. It is very hard for outsiders to understand why Obamacare has proved so disastrous for ordinary people in America, because all they hear is the supporting rhetoric, but as ever this is not the real story. Here’s a fantastic article telling it how it is, and why repealing it has to be the only option: https://www.sott.net/article/257835-Obamacare-A-Deception

Sadly I am sure that is not the only thing he will be backtracking on. He will only have a limited amount of political capital to fight with and fighting on all fronts will be impossible. Still if he only does one of the things he spoke about it will be an improvement.

Sure, but Labour’s 9.3 per cent vote increase is excellent. The Tory 10.6 per cent increase indicates that they should have had the seat prior to this, so I’m not sure what’s going on with the figures there. The increases show Labour would have had 31.1 per cent and the Tories 31.6 per cent last time.
UKIP was the real loser with a drop of 14.5 per cent.

Because of your article, I have changed my thinking. It might be that Trump only came up with what he did, to get his foot in the door. I’m hoping he doesn’t really believe the worst aspects of his campaigning and that he just wanted to get in the white house to affect proper change.

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